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Language of Uurwerk
((Note that the following is the exact opposite of set in stone. Feel free to discuss at the Forum and make changes.)) Sounds I know nothing about this. What used to be here was inaccurate and quite probably incorrect. Sentence Structure There is one word for nouns, adjs, advs, and verbs. There is a separation indicator (a''') that separates idea-forms from each other. Within a form, the order is assumed to be decreasing importance -- so the first word in the subject phase is taken as the actual noun etc. The language follows a S-O-V word order. '''nga can be used as a skip (including the following a), indicating this place is to be inferred. If it's the verb, often the nga is also dropped, which, though it can mean that the verb is to be inferred, usually means that the verb is the default "to communicate". Uurwerkians think in terms of this default communication, so their sentences seem to naturally flow as a description (or reporting, or questioning etc.) of communication. There are defaults for the Subject and the Object as well, specified by simply using a''' without a concept in between instead of '''nga. (Though, the inference of nga can also be 'the default', and indeed is widely used in that sense, so watch out there.) However, subject and object defaults are much less widely used and are more subject to variation in different contexts (see the section on contexts below). (Technically, every sentence should begin and end with a', thus looking like "'a subject a''' object '''a verb a'''". This is considered archaic, though remnants of it remain in other words and constructions.) E.g. Sky a Blue (verb dropped) The sky is blue. Weather Day a nga Pleasure The day's weather pleases (inferred me). Smile a Weather Day (verb dropped) My smile communicates to the day's weather. (More idiomatic but equivalent.) Parenthetical Asides Idea-forms within a subject, object, or verb could, theoretically, mean anything those words together in decreasing order of importance could mean. "Month Week Two" could mean "the second week of the month", "a week of the second month", or even "the second week of the second month". If which is meant is not clear from context, Uurwerkians will generally group the appropriate constructs with '''kce and ekc. Wrench kce Usage You ekc a nga (verb dropped) The wrench you used speaks to me. (as opposed to, say, "Your used wrench speaks to me." Idiomatic for 'Hand me that wrench you used.') It is allowed, though considered flowery and hard to follow beyond the simplest cases, to insert entirely new sentences within the kc-parentheses. When this is done, the grouping words become kca and akc. Wrench kca You a nga Usage akc a nga (verb dropped) The wrench you used speaks to me. (alternate) (Technically, there is a complex set of rules that determine the canonical interpretation of an ambiguous sequence of idea-forms, that, for instance, say that "Month Week Two" is canonically to be interpreted as "the second week of the month". They are fairly arbitrary, however, and have about the same level of respect that Strunk and White have in English.) Continuations Normally a sentence is assumed to end after the verb, or at the start of the next subject if the verb is dropped. But there are two special sentence continuation indicators - ta, and kha. Both of these immediately end the sentence, filling in a's and '''nga's as necessary. '''ta is a repeat operator -- it means 'append the following idea-forms in the S-O-V pattern to the preceding sentence', and kha is a tagging operator, fulfilling the same purpose as ?,!, etc in English but allowing any word to be used. So, Wrench a Sluor ta Usage You kha Request means "Could you please hand that wrench you used to Sluor?" The purpose of ta: Firstly, the new terms are implicitly grouped, if it makes sense. But more importantly, since these extra descriptors are appended to the end of the initial words, they are automatically less important, less relevant to the meaning of the concept, than the initial SOV group. Thus, the sentence can be interrupted at any time, once it is understood, and Uurwerkians make heavy use of this ability. Silence in Uurwerkian is taken as a request for clarification, which is then done by adding more and more precise ta-clauses. Since qoth is the null word, signifying 'nothing', kha qoth can be used to immediately end a sentence that has no further meaning. Through colloquial shortening, this has been commonly reduced to qath as an all-purpose sentence-end marker. Pronouns Pronouns are not commonly explicitly used in Uurwerkian, usually being inferred. There are three pronouns, however, roughly translating into Subject, Object, and Verb (kek, kik, and kok). These refer to the respective form in the previous sentence. These pronouns can be appended with a number, meaning that many sentences ago. It is common to see upto three sentences previously being referred to in this manner, and references as high as fifty can be found in highly formal speech and legal documents. ta-clauses are considered to begin a new sentence for the purposes of these pronouns. The equivalents of the first and second person pronouns are simply "Speaker" and "Listener", even in writing. Since they don't seem to, a priori, have the same status as the pronouns do in English, it's surprising how much resistance the idea of replacing them with "Writer" and "Reader" in writing has undergone. An Uurwerkian writer has recently popularised appending Future to pronouns, to refer to an object yet to be mentioned explicitly. This is treated with suspicion among the older members of the populace, but has encountered far less resistance overall. It is hypothesised that if if we knew why these two ideas have been met with their varying levels of resistance, we'd know a lot more about the Uurwerkian culture and mentality than we do now. The Role of a''' You may have noticed that the sound '''a is within many of the connecting words above. (It's always the same sound -- since Uurwerkian doesn't have the long a, a''' by itself can only mean the short a sound.) Uurwerkian reserves this sound for the endings of concepts. Note that only those connective words which signal the end of one concept have the 'a' sound. It is only used in this scenario -- Uurwerkian vocabulary words do not actually contain this sound. The purpose of this is similar to that of the importance-ordering -- when the concept contained within one block is understood, the listener can almost zone out, while just keeping their ear pricked for the 'a' sound. This readily enables speech as a sort of extra task that is done in addition to, say, working on an engine or a problem or something similar, for the listener has a useful and unambiguous cue to reset their attention back to maximum. Though this idea does not have all that meaning in text, The Uurwerkian script lightly emphasises the 'a' vowel to give a similar visual cue when reading. Contexts Finally, Uurwerkian has contexts. The context can be inferred, or explicitly specified with a standalone '''kha-clause at the beginning of the conversation. A context is basically a collection of defaults, for subjects, objects, verbs, subject-descriptors, object-descriptors, verb-descriptors, as well as implied additional ta-clauses and kha-clauses. This can be used to collapse lengthy sentences concisely into their most important bits. Contexts are learned and created - specifically, they are a formalisation of shared understanding. Two friends may have a default context they slip into when talking to each other; a master and student may have another. These very low level contexts will generally be specialisations of broader contexts -- all Uurwekians learn the general "Home" and "School" and "Work" contexts, for instance, and a specialised version of them which is specifically that of their particular home, school, and work. Category:User created content